Your campsite is a mess. There are “totally safe to burn” plastic wrappers melted in last night’s ashes. The roasting sticks are coated with dirt-encrusted marshmallow goo. And some sort of animal went through the trash bag you left out. (Oops.)

We get it. Move fast and break things. Just ship it! But what’s left a giant stored procedure with cursors, temp tables, and mystery calculations. It’s a big black box that nobody wants to touch. Let’s fix that. We’ll open the lid on an example monolith and do major surgery. What’s left will perform better, be easier to understand, encourage code reuse, and be easier to test.

You might even begin to like writing SQL.

(This talk is geared to developers using Microsoft SQL Server, but many of its principles apply to any RDBMS.)

Shiny new touch bar MacBook Pro under one arm, JSON strolls in with a coffee from that new place with the ethically sourced beans. Grizzled XML looks up from an old ThinkPad and grunts, remembering that the stained company mug on the cluttered desk had been empty for some time. JSON was sure to be assigned the new web features while XML would be spending another week on those legacy third party integrations…

SQL Server 2016 brings JSON support, but does that mean XML is old news? Which has more features? Do they matter? Which is faster?

We’ll review the many similarities and highlight some important differences between SQL Server 2016’s XML and JSON support. You’ll leave equipped to make the right choice for your environment.

Boys, there’s something important we need to talk about. Girls don’t have cooties. It’s time to take down the “No Gurlz Allowed” sign. This clubhouse is big enough for all of us, and we’ll all have a better time if we learn to play nicely together.

The percentage of women in technology has fallen steadily since the early 80s. 92% of Stack Overflow survey respondents identified as a male. Girls are discouraged from technology at a young age, and those who make it through are often driven out by an unwelcoming technical community. There are the obvious examples of sickening death threats against those in the gaming industry, but the daily grind of subtle undermining of women’s competencies also takes its toll.

Teams perform better with diverse viewpoints, so it’s in all of our best interests to solve this problem. And of course it’s just the right thing to do.

We’ll explore some of the challenges women face in technology communities, review ways we can all help improve our environment, and discuss efforts to bring more women into technology led by groups like Girl Develop It.

You know you’ve done it. Maybe it was the lucky number 7. Maybe it was an enigmatic X. Maybe you smooshed some words together in ALLCAPS. That should be easier to spot, right? Because some day you might need to change it—in every stored procedure, function, and view.

Magic numbers, codes, identifiers, constants, enumerations. Whatever you call them, all applications have them. Sure it’s quick and easy to sprinkle the values throughout your code, but that breeds mistakes, rigidity, and obfuscation. There has to be a better way!

Other languages give us real constants and enums—with IntelliSense and compilation-level enforcement. Well guess what– SQL Server does too, sort of. Join us and learn to write clearer, easier to maintain code without sacrificing performance.

Since SQL Server 2005, a popular method for concatenating values across multiple rows has been to use the built-in XML functions. Of course they work well for the simple case involving a single field, but with one small trick, they can be used to make multiple, correlated lists based on different fields.